Investment in European startups held up last year despite fears of a slowdown, with some $12 billion invested during the year, according to an annual report compiled by French investment advisors Clipperton, working with Digimind’s WhoGotFunded database. Read More
SeatGeek is launching a new way to give ticketbuyers a better sense of exactly what they’ll see from a given seat. The new feature, called Pano, offers a 360-degree view of the empty venue — you can look around in all directions, Street View-style, and you can also jump to different parts of the stadium to compare the view from the different seats. “It’s super… Read More
Oracle acquired API management startup Apiary today for an undisclosed amount. Apiary, which launched in 2011 and has raised a modest $8.5 million, helps companies manage APIs, which is an increasingly important job. As every company becomes a software company, they are building platforms and providing ways for customers and third-parties to build applications using their technologies.… Read More
Yext, the company that helps businesses make sure that their location data appears correctly in search results, is announcing that Jim Steele will be joining the company full-time as president and chief revenue officer. Steele was previously on the board at Yext and was most recently at InsideSales. “I found a new younger Mark Benioff and I’m really excited,” Steele says… Read More
Logan, the third instalment in the Wolverine series, is set to premiere on March 3, and there’s a new trailer to check out. The movie has looked, in previous teasers, like a Little Miss Sunshine with a lot more gritty violence and a smaller family unit that includes Wolverine, a young X-23 and Professor Charles Xavier. In this new teaser, it presents a look at X-23 doing a lot more… Read More
Adult coloring book apps are all the rage, and now Disney’s getting in on that action, too. The company has today released its own take on the genre with the launch of the Color by Disney mobile application, and app that lets wannabe artists practice their skills by coloring in templates featuring popular characters and scenes from Disney and Pixar and films. At launch, there are… Read More
Today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Alibaba and the International Olympic Committee announced that Alibaba will become the official “Cloud Services” provider for the Olympics. The deal will last through 2028. Considering the next three olympics will be in Asia – South Korea in 2018, than Japan in 2020, than China in 2022 – Alibaba may have seen this as a good… Read More
Who programs the programmers? Soon enough, it might not be people behind the development of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence tech, but other AI. MIT looks at the most recent work done by a range of different organizations, including Google Brain, who are working on AI that can develop machine learning software – and finds that in many cases, the results that come… Read More
Developers have long tried (and mostly failed) to give users a social media platform that centers around music. Apps like DubSmash and Musical.ly have risen above the rest, but a brand new app called Vertigo is looking to mix it up. What’s interesting about Vertigo is that the app lets you share music with a plus one, your core group of friends, or to the public on a beat-for-beat level.… Read More
CryptoMove, a new security startup emerging from stealth today, has a different view of data security. Instead of simply encrypting, monitoring or recording it; the early-stage startup breaks the data into pieces and continually moves it around, making it virtually impossible for hackers to do anything with it should they get ahold of one of the pieces. The company is having a big day today as… Read More
It’s pitchin’ time! In preparation for Disrupt New York in May I’m going to hold a few pitching workshops in New York for you all. We’ll listen to and critique ten pitches on January 25 at 6:30pm at the Knotel space at 22 West 38th Street, 3rd Floor. This is an informal pitch-off but the two best teams will get two tickets to Disrupt New York and the undying admiration… Read More
Fujifilm has revealed release dates for a trio of new cameras in its classically inspired retro digital lineup, as well as new lenses and other accessories. The news today from Fujifilm includes pricing and availability for the GFX 50S, the new digital medium format camera with an entirely new lineup of GF system lenses; a new X-T20 compact interchangeable lens camera; and the X100F, the latest… Read More
Back in November, Samsung announced preliminary plans to start testing Android 7.0 on its latest devices. For the second year in a row, the company was mostly testing the waters early on, asking a select group of interested early adopters to test the update via its Galaxy Beta Program. Lo, all these months later the almost-latest version of Google’s mobile operating system (the… Read More
After a short preview in September last year, and the small matter of getting acquired for $26.2 billion by Microsoft, today LinkedIn — the social network for the professional world with close to 470 million users — is finally unveiling its redesign of its desktop site, complete with a simpler, app-like look; a new messaging experience that appears as a pop-up on the… Read More
Panasonic is hoping that it can get even closer to partner Tesla, after the relationship between the two has proven so fruitful in the realm of electric vehicle batteries. The Japanese company is looking to become involved in the production of Tesla’s self-driving system, too, with a proposal of collaborating on sensor development. That’s according to Panasonic CEO Kazuhiro Tsuga,… Read More
The hype behind augmented reality tech has been giving a lot of display manufacturers the motivation to rethink how modern displays work. Current optics technologies being used by HoloLens, Vuzix and Magic Leap all rely on a complicated high-end type of waveguide display technology that utilizes lenses with etched structures that capture and diffract light being projected into the edge of… Read More
A fun little side project-cum-startup from two of the founders of Soundwave, the social music company acquired by Spotify, wants to turn patents into art. Launching today, Retro Patents lets you buy prints of famous patents to hang on your office wall, or at home, if that’s your thing. Read More
The Davos Delusion Davos leaders are gathering this week to change the world. Again. “We are faced by a world which is increasingly schizophrenic. Our world is rapidly changing and power is shifting geopolitically, in business terms and even in the virtual world. Power, wealth and well-being are spread in ever more complex ways, leading to a world which is harder and harder to understand… Read More
Peanut — which TechCrunch understands will launch as early as next month — is a new London startup founded by Deliveroo co-founder and former CTO Greg Orlowski and ex-Badoo deputy CEO Michelle Kennedy. Read More
